The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Official Twitter accounts tried to tamp down rumors

Sandy came and went in D.C. without leaving much of a footprint beyond a four-day weekend and power outages in the low thousands. New York and New Jersey, though, were ravaged: flooding, explosions, home-destroying fires, a collapse of a crane and a building facade, and millions without power. You might think that level of devastation would give social media enough meat to tweet, but you would be wrong. As the water level began to rise on the East coast, social media sites were flooded with fake photos and misinformation. When disaster strikes, make sure to bring your sandbags of skepticism to Twitter to avoid getting duped.

I first encountered this via Google chat. A D.C. friend wrote, "Holy wow. Can that be real?" He included a link to this Instagram photo:

I LoLed, because of how obviously fake the photo was. That was Hurricane Photoshop not Hurricane Sandy. "You've been Sandy-rolled," I replied.

What I didn't realize is that the photo was actually in the process of going viral, along with Photo-shopped photos of sharks swimming in New York streets, screenshots from The Day After Tomorrow, and epic, dramatic photos of storms that actually happened, but months and years before Sandy. A photo passed around in awe of the Old Guard standing watch over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier while Sandy supposedly raged was actually taken during a storm in September. Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic has been capturing these photos and sorting the real ones from the fake ones. (Hint: if you see the one of someone scuba-diving in the Times Square subway station, it's fake, but if you see one of the Battery Tunnel completely underwater, it's real.)

As people waited for the storm to hit, there was a desire to consume images and news, a desire for entertainment in the form of dramatic photos and videos. It's the reason why local news and The Weather Channel thrive when disaster strikes. But as people turned to social media -- which was distributing news faster than traditional news sources, thanks to those people living through it streaming their experiences in real time -- that desire was sometimes met with fake information.

Those guilty of spreading fake information often get away with it during the chaos of the storm, but one Twitter user was so prolific in spreading false rumors that he's been called out by Buzzfeed: @ComfortablySmug started a rumor that the New York Stock Exchange was flooded (a rumor that rose from social media virality all the way to CNN), that ConEdison was preemptively shutting down all power in Manhattan (that one wound up kind of coming true, with power going out for much of New York below 42nd Street), that NYC subway would be shut down for the rest of the week (again, this may turn out to be true but was not the case at the time), and that "that Will Smith zombie movie is coming true. All bridges to/from Manhattan are being sealed off, zombie marauders to reign the streets." (A lot of bridges are in fact shut down, but not all. And there have been no verified zombie sightings yet.)

In the flood of information on Twitter, the truth sometimes got swept away

Some of the information @ComfortablySmug was tweeting was true and some of it wasn't, which made it harder to discern what was false. But many of his followers, who include members of the New York blogging community, started retweeting the fake stuff, allowing the falsehoods to spread. If you actually read through Smug's full Twitter page, it's pretty obvious that he was not a reliable source of information; his tongue is firmly in his cheek in a good percentage of his tweets, but many Tweeps and journalists desperate for new information about the storm took him at his 140 characters. Given the likelihood that a tweet will be encountered without context, subtle satire does not play well during a disaster. Some of the journalists taken in by him are now eager to crucify him.

Smug, whose Twitter bio focuses mainly on his support for Mitt Romney, is affiliated with has a link in his bio to a financial advisors website for which he used to blog, where his bio is given again under the pseudonym Comfortably Smug: "Comfortably Smug has worked in research in the alternative asset management industry at a hedge fund with over $5bn AUM. He has a BS in Economics and his writing has been published in New York Magazine and been quoted in the Wall Street Journal among other publications. His interests include politics, accumulating possessions, and drinking IPAs. He’s really just here to provide some snark and occasional humor."

His writing for New York Mag consists of a 2008 sex diary, which isn't wholly safe for work, that he wrote when he was 25. He also did an interview with the Mag in 2009 in which he claims that he's "not as blatantly an asshole in person" as he is online. The interview includes a photo with his eyes blacked out. He's tried to keep his real world identity separate from his online identity, but he has been identified as Shashank Tripathi, a hedge fund analyst who iswasa campaign consultant for the GOP candidate in a New York race. Now everyone wants to know why he seemed so determined to spread misinformation during the storm. I think the answer will be an obvious one: he liked the attention and the RTs. This is why trolls do what they do. He wanted to be part of the storm, causing as much chaos online as Sandy was causing in Manhattan.

Thankfully, Twitter is a "truth machine," says John Herrman of Buzzfeed. "Twitter’s capacity to spread false information is more than canceled out by its savage self-correction."

Herrman points out that in response to the claims that the NYSE had been flooded with three feet of water, social media users in the area uploaded photos of the building looking high and dry to combat the rumors. "Twitter is a fact-processing machine on a grand scale, propagating then destroying rumors at a neck-snapping pace. To dwell on the obnoxiousness of the noise is to miss the result: That we end up with more facts, sooner, with less ambiguity," writes Herrman.

Turning to social media sources is reassuring in times like these. Information moves faster there and is more immediate. You see events through the eyes of people experiencing them rather than through a (professional journalist) intermediary. But when seeking information there, be skeptical. If your initial reaction is, "Can this be real?", trust that instinct. Seek out reliable sources. Rather than believing (and Retweeting) claims that ConEd employees are trapped in a building, follow ConEd's Twitter account. Follow sources you trust (and hope they're not easily duped). And remember that if you're on social media, you're helping with the spread of information. You've heard it before and you'll hear it again: we're all journalists now. Take the responsibility seriously. Or, if you want to be an Onion-type journalist, perhaps hashtag your tweets with #kidding.

Update (October 31): After being outed, Tripathi apologized and resigned from the congressional campaign of Christopher Wight. But a New York councilman is unimpressed by the regret and is asking the Manhattan District Attorney to consider criminal charges against Tripathi for spreading misinformation during a crisis, reports Buzzfeed.

Correction: This Forbes piece originally included a link to the LinkedIn profile for the wrong Shashank Tripathi. I apologize for the mistake.